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Friday, April 17, 2015

Back to Fitness Basics: Eating Smarter

The first step to eating smart comes with shopping smart. Eating healthy is very dependent on what you buy from the grocery store. You are in essence, what you eat when it comes to food you consume on a daily bases. Take a look for an example of what you may look like if the food you consumed each week was mostly from fast food. Could you keep a healthy body while maintaining those negative eating habits? Truth is, is that you can not out work a bad diet, and a healthy body starts in the kitchen.

For foods that are not whole foods, are manufactured. Meaning that these types of foods are man made and will consist of more than one ingredient on the food label. The biggest thing to understand when shopping for healthy food, is to understand how to read a food label. “Reading food labels can be quite confusing; manufacturers tend to hide the bad ingredients and chemicals behind different names (especially with sugar).” “1” A good rule of thumb is that if you can not read an ingredient, it may not be healthy for you to begin with. Eating smarter also consist of choosing foods that are composed of few ingredients. Another good method to follow, is that if it has more than five ingredients, do not eat it.

Reading food labels of manufactured foods also consist of understanding the specific order of the ingredients on the label. “Carefully review the ingredients list. Note that the ingredient list is in decreasing order of substance weight in the product. That is, the ingredients that are listed first are the most abundant in the product. The ingredient list is useful for identifying whether or not the product contains transfat, solid fats, added sugars, whole grains and refined grains.” 2

Choosing what to eat can be the greatest step to make when choosing healthy habits to live by. It doesn’t matter how much plates (45 lbs.) you lift in the gym, as much as what you put on your plate at home. Remember these two easy steps for reading food labels next time that you go shopping, and you will truly be eating smart!

1 comment:

It's so true that reading the label on foods can help you eat healthier. Some people may not know this, but certain of bread that you buy at the store has high fructose corn syrup. Who needs corn syrup in their bread? It's proof that the food industry will do whatever to get people to buy their product. Most days it is just easier to stay away from "boxed" goods all together! Great blog.